Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
Computer stuff
Have been thinking about migrating the blog to either Melody or MovableType 5.1. For this little blog, MT51 might be a bit of overkill, but there are a lot of interesting looking new features. I’ve had a Melody blog running on my desktop for a few weeks now. Runs pretty well, looks nice, familiar interface.
There is some behind the scenes work that needs to be done first to install some missing Perl modules. Then I need to plan out how to execute the migration.
Blocking all the .cn IP address blocks appears to have been pretty effective. Still seeing a lot of traffic, but all they get is a 403 error.
Bandwidth used is back to normal levels, around 70 MB/day instead of 1.5 GB/day.
Despite with having 3000+ Deny from directives in the .htaccess file, blog performance actually seems to be better. The problem with chronic 500 Internal Server Errors has gotten a lot better since I put the block in. Not having to handle all those bot requests seems to have really helped.
For some reason computers with Chinese IP addresses have been hammering the blog.
First they were beating on the comment script with attempts to spam all the entries.
Now they’re trying to repeatedly suck down every single page from the blog. According to Dreamhost’s stats, bandwidth on the blog has gone from around 40 MB/day to over 1GB/day as a result. It’s like they’re trying to DoS me.
For now I’ve got a Deny from All directive in the .htaccess file to just block all access until I can figure out what to do. Maybe I can find some mod_security rules to help block this crap.
Update: Thanks to Country IP Blocks, I filled up an .htaccess file to Deny all the IP blocks assigned to .cn (China). Probably inefficient, but effective. Even with an 87kB .htaccess file to process with each request, blog access actually seems to be a little faster. Guess that shows how much the blog was being hit.
Imagine, a soundboard type app where you can select an HTTP status code and it displays in great big letters on your Android device.
Someone walks up to you while you’re busy with something. You select the 404 code and show the offender the 404: Not Found. Someone asks you a stupid question. You flash them a big 400: Bad Request.
What a brilliant communication tool!
I need to learn how to write Android apps now.
During today’s hardware testing, I learned that the SysRq button actually does stuff!
The appropriate combination of key presses can send signals to the Linux kernel to make it do things, particularly in the event of crashes or freezes.
The magic SysRq key is a key combination understood by the Linux kernel, which allows the user to perform various low level commands regardless of the system’s state. It is often used to recover from freezes, or to reboot a computer without corrupting the filesystem.
The option to enable this needs to be set when the kernel is compiled and then also enabled. On my Fedora 14, it appears to be disabled by default (/proc/sys/kernel/sysrq is 0). When I have a bit of time, I’ll try enabling it to see if it works.